Approach To Learning And Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

Importance of CPD

Evaluate your own approach to learning and continuing professional development (CPD), which should be informed by a critical consideration of existing approaches.

Learning is and has always been one of the major part of the lives of man. Even at the very young age, people show the signs of understanding and discovering pertaining to the wide word around them. There are students who find it difficult to learn and hence, they are considered to be suffering from learning disability. It is the responsibility and duty of the common man to stand beside them and help them in improving. However, due to this reason there are several intuitions and universities that have developed different courses and programs in order to ensure that the needs of these special individuals are met. Moreover, there are only few surveyors who have remained unaffected by the fast pace of changes that have affected the profession of surveying over the last few decades. Professionalism depends significantly on the ability of responding quickly to the changing nature of the market condition, to the requirements of the clients and to the impacts of the different policies made by the government. We are all always encouraged to foster innovation and to welcome change. In order to adopt to these changes, development of new skills is very important. The concept of “keeping up to date3” is no longer optional, it instead is increasingly key to the organisational and professional success. This paper shall elaborate on a clear understanding of the concept of CPD. It shall reflect on my own approach to learning and continuing professional development as well by taking into consideration of the existing approaches.

CPD, also known as the Continuous Professional Development is widely acknowledge to be of a great importance, particularly in the school life and is contributing to the personal and professional development for the staffs as well as in the process of improvement in the field of learning and teaching. In other words, it can define as a systematic development and maintenance of the professional and personal competence. It comprises of all those activities that led to the personal and professional development and the ones that are not acquired directly in the regular work. The fundamental features of successful CPD are that it is continuous, organisationally or professionally focused, broad based and structured. It is often assumed to be limited or restricted to the formal off the job training courses or seminars. It is to note that as CPD is about the school improvement and that it aims towards providing top quality learning and teaching, it is one of the key elements of school improvement (Keogh and Byrne 2015). It is very important due to many factors. It increases the level of confidence among the students and the teachers as well as develops a sense of self-esteem, hence, making the teachers highly motivated and the students then improve their learning skills. It lays more focus on the assessment for learning, hence, allowing creative use of the learning styles as well as increasing the partnership with others outside of the class room. It is all about supplying recognition for the skills, competencies and knowledge that are gained by the staff by means of formal accreditation. It aims to provide knowledge and technical capability in order make the school as secure and safe place for each and every one.

Features of successful CPD

In present days, skills and knowledge play a vital part in professional world. By means of encouraging CPD as a part of the academic course, they are initiating the creation of competitive advantage for both the employees and the students as an outcome of their increased expertise in their chosen filed. There are many activities which could be taken into consideration for achieving proper proficiency and for being able to successfully educate the students and the other individuals undergoing learning disabilities (Busch, Barzel and Leuders 2015). Some of the examples of these activities comprise of the reflections on the dyslexic learners, teaching beyond the classroom, making use of reflection in order to reflect on the IFL etc.

The formal training method within my working environment comprises not only the professional teaching qualification that are required by the government but with the same, also the ones that are related to the Offender learning. For enrolling for some of the courses like DTLLS, I needed to sit for the second level numeracy and literacy exams although I have already completed my O levels in both these subjects. Experimental learning is one of the most important part of my approach of daily professional development and it applies to each and every aspect of my work right from overcoming the problems of production in the workplace to finding out better solution for encouraging my peers and workers for trying different approaches to learning.

Being a teacher, I make use of self-reflection in order to critically evaluate and analyse my actions. It helps in refocusing all my thinking regarding my current knowledge so as to generate new ideas and knowledge which help me in modifying my behaviours, actions and the treatments along with my learning needs. When I observe a general lack in the insight and depth within the answers of my students while going through some of their assignments, the very first though of mine in that case is that it is the result of my poor approach in the process of subject delivery (Bailey 2015). However, when I observed that there were some students who depended only on the very limited materials that they were provided with at the time of class sessions for answering the questions of their assignments, it revealed to me the mistake of my assumption that I have done initially. I learned that there was no mistake with my approach, instead the students were unwilling to carry out both the independent studies as well as the further research until and unless they are related with the summative assessments of theirs. For this purpose, I decided to limit the resources that I gave them during the class in order to force them to study well and research more independently from the class sessions. However, later I also realised that I am doing this in wrong way. There are several demerits of this action and I realised this after recalling my student years. Having been a student myself, I am well aware of the fact that I too used to often depend on the strategic approach to learning and used to research only when I was forced to do so (Voogt et al. 2015). Therefore knowing that my students are also workers who might find very little amount of time for their extra studies beyond the classrooms and just like me, they would also be very greatly assisted and helped by the activities from the class sessions. Therefore, I kept on focusing on my previous approach with a hope that they shall be learning from it and would improve in the near future.

Activities for achieving proficiency

CPD can be delivered in a wide range of formats which can be either formal or non-formal in nature and might not result in awarding learning credits. There are many basic features that could be identified as having the characteristic of a successful CPD strategy (Tran et al. 2014). Two of the significant approach of learning and CPD is fragmented and focused approach. In the fragmented approach, the CPD are characterised as mentioned below:

• CPD is not related to the organisational goals
• It is regarded as a cost, instead of an investment
• It is focused on discontinuous training instead of development
• It is unsystematic
• It is menu driven such as ordering from any mail catalogue
• It is all about knowledge acquisition and directive training
• It is considered as of no importance and the course attendance is often cancelled because of the lack of commitment and pressure of work.
• It is not transferred and its learning is very rarely implemented at the office
• It is viewed one of the reward for good performance.

On the other hand, in focused approach, training and CPD are characterised as:

• Related to individual needs and organisational strategy
• An investment in the human resource management
• Focused on the process of on-the-job and skills development along with the knowledge based training
• Been evaluated with the post course and pre course assessment
• Transferred to the changes and actions taking place in the workplace
• Learning, instead of training
• Flexible in the applications including that of self-development, distance and open approaches.

One of the most useful framework is been developed by (Moorley and Chinn 2015). He have distinguished two different approaches and they are the fragmented approach and the focused approach. Additionally, there are many problematic in terms of the prevailing conception of the CPD (Dimmock 2016). The very first is the dilemma that whether or not CPD is to assume an outcome or input based approach. The input based approach formally acknowledges that each and every individual has undertaken some or the other kind or prescribed CPD activity. On the other hand, the outcome based approach urges the fact that the practitioners analyse their needs of learning, then identify the suitable learning opportunities as finally, assess whether or not their needs of learning are satisfied by the activity. It is also very powerfully oriented towards the experimental instead of the classroom learning. It is also to note that there is a very thorny problem of the issue of measurement and monitoring of the CPD. The input based approach addresses this issue by recording the course attendance instead of trying to assess the results of participation (Knox 2015). However, measuring the outcome bases approach is a good deal and could be sometimes more time consuming for the professionals who are seeking for recording their CPD. It requires a very tough approach on the participants’ part.

References:

Bailey, M., 2015. Professional development of HR practitioners–a phenomenographic study. European Journal of Training and Development, 39(3), pp.220-238.

Busch, J., Barzel, B. and Leuders, T., 2015. Promoting secondary teachers’ diagnostic competence with respect to functions: development of a scalable unit in Continuous Professional Development. ZDM, 47(1), pp.53-64.

Dimmock, C., 2016. Conceptualising the research–practice–professional development nexus: mobilising schools as ‘research-engaged’professional learning communities. Professional Development in Education, 42(1), pp.36-53.

Keogh, P. and Byrne, C., 2015. Creating Opportunities for Inter-Professional Working and Building Common Approaches to Continuous Professional Development. European Journal of Social Education.

Knox, S., 2015. A model of continuous professional development for registered pre-hospital practitioners in Ireland.

Moorley, C. and Chinn, T., 2015. Using social media for continuous professional development. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 71(4), pp.713-717.

Tran, D., Tofade, T., Thakkar, N. and Rouse, M., 2014. US and international health professions’ requirements for continuing professional development. American journal of pharmaceutical education, 78(6), p.129.

Voogt, J., Laferrière, T., Breuleux, A., Itow, R.C., Hickey, D.T. and McKenney, S., 2015. Collaborative design as a form of professional development. Instructional science, 43(2), pp.259-282.